Supermarkets today vowed not to sell meat or milk from cloned animals - even if allowed to - because customers do not want such products.

Their claim follows warnings from campaigners that British stores could be swamped by cloned goods within months after Brussels talks about industry controls ended in defeat.

Scores of dairy cows from cloned parents are already being reared on UK farms. The failure to toughen legislation means there will be no mandatory labelling of products from cloned animals or their offspring.

In an echo of the row over GM food a decade ago, British Retail Consortium spokeswoman Sarah Cordey said: "Shops have no interest in selling meat or dairy products from cloned animals or their offspring because customers clearly do not want to buy it.

"If rules change in Brussels, allowing these products into the food chain, supermarkets will need to rely on promises from reputable producers if they want to continue to offer guarantees that products are free of cloned meat."

The EU imports hundreds of thousands of tons of beef every year from the United States and Argentina, which both authorise cloning for commercial purposes but have no system to trace clone-derived meat.

A spokesman for the RSPCA said: "We are totally opposed to cloning for food production on animal welfare and ethical grounds."

The European health commissioner, John Dalli, said scientific assessments on cattle found "no risk to health as there is no differentiation between cloned and normally bred animals".

MEPs who backed new controls said they were dismayed that no agreement could be reached.Italian Gianni Pittella and Kartika Liotard of Holland said: "We made a huge effort to compromise but we were not willing to betray consumers on their right to know whether food comes from animals bred using clones.

"Since European public opinion is overwhelmingly against cloning for food, a commitment to label all food from cloned offspring is a bare minimum." MEP Dagmar Roth-Behrendt of Germany said "billions of litres of cloned milk" could now flood Europe.

In the absence of new rules, the European Union will now revert to the 1997 law on so-called "novel foods", which does not mention cloning as the technology did not exist at the time.